Melancholia i depresja w literaturze pisanej przez kobiety po 1989 roku
Melancholy and depression in women’s writing after 1989 (A thematic outline)

Summary/Abstract: This article considers a number of novels written after 1989 by women writers (Olga Tokarczuk, Joanna Bator, Izabela Filipiak, Anna Nasiłowska, Anna Janko, Manuela Gretkowska, Marta Dzido). These women’s writers belong to two generations: the first is of the writers who had their debuts at the beginning of the 1990s, and the other, younger generation is of women writers born at the beginning of the 1980s, who appeared on the literary scene within the last few years. I read these texts from the perspective of the women’s contestation of the traditional female roles and duties (such as marriage, family, the tyranny of beauty, and love). I argue that the post-1989 transition, Polish women writers openly and with great intensity talk about their experiences of growing up, re-discovering their lost connections with their bodies, their mothers and with their lost home(land)s. Following the writing on melancholy and depression (e.g. Julia Kristeva is among the critical voices), I present the motives, narratives, and the techniques in which the women writers started to write about the loss and the longing within their particular position in the Polish society. I show how their writing becomes melancholic: describing the longing, showing the threads of depression, and at the same time, describing the things (desires, dreams, ways of behaviour, etc.) that the yearning can be replaced with. From such a perspective the texts themselves are the ultimate results of the fight against the melancholy that threatens women writers.

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